Send "James Blunt " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 “I’m sorry,” James Blunt seems to say, pleading with the millions who’ve turned their backs. “I didn’t know. I thought you wanted more. I thought you wanted me to grow, to mature, to be inspired by something other than my poor track record at relationships.“I thought you wanted art, when you just wanted a melody.” Rarely has an opening track been this much of an apology. “Stay the Night” is an upbeat little song sung from a boy to a girl that ceremoniously drops every pretense that weighed down James Blunt’s second album. “If this is what we’ve got / Then what we’ve got is gold,” he sings to a quickly-strummed guitar and a beat that moves quicker and lighter than anything he’s ever released. The trajectory of Blunt’s career projection to this point isn’t a fall off a cliff so much as a rocket pointed straight down. Debuting with a pop song as perfectly crafted and insufferably sincere as “You’re Beautiful” didn’t really offer many opportunities for improvement, though the album that surrounded it was a perfectly competent collection of pop songs. Back to Bedlam had hooks that lasted for days anchoring songs like “High” and “Goodbye My Lover”, songs that feature Blunt’s “I” and a constantly-unnamed “you”, ambiguous enough to apply to just about any joy or crisis his listeners might be feeling. Blunt managed to make an album that told us almost nothing about him feel deeply personal through humble, sometimes sparse production and a voice that constantly sounded as though it was on the edge of breaking. That he would follow it with an album like All the Lost Souls was almost inevitable; retreading the ground he wore out on his first album would have been a critical disaster, after all. So he populated his songs with names and dates, touching on the subjects of addiction and age, all with a production touch that could nicely be called heavy-handed. Blunt’s sincerity and humility was replaced with a self-assuredness that doesn’t mesh with the still-almost-broken voice. His audience didn’t buy it. The critics didn’t buy it. All the Lost Souls went quickly and quietly. His star has fallen so far that Europe got Some Kind of Trouble nearly two months before America. Nobody in America really noticed, either, until “Stay the Night” wormed its way into an ABC network television promo, and millions of viewers remembered who he was....full text |
| Bbc |
| When James Blunt released his second album, All the Lost Souls, in 2007, critical attention focused on lead single 1973 and, in particular, the line "As time goes by I will always be in a club with you in 1973, singing Here We Go Again". "But he wasn’t alive in 1973," they said. "And what’s this Here We Go Again? Does he mean Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again? That hadn’t even been recorded." Talk about playing the man, not the ball. Essentially, You’re Beautiful isn’t easily forgiven; a crime heinous enough to deny a singer artistic licence. Not that any of this mattered one jot to Captain Blunt, who went on selling millions of records, squiring lovely ladies the world over and being a thoroughly good egg on Sesame Street. Prejudice ignored All the Lost Souls’ good points, which included a serviceable slice of classic pop in the maligned 1973 and generally decent Elton John-indebted melodies across the rest of its easy-listening tracks. Nothing any more awful than Blunt’s own tremulous whine. But while that voice retains its special majesty here, Some Kind of Trouble can’t match its predecessor’s virtues. Its lack of life is a problem. The single Stay the Night is a deceptively bright introduction, a joyous bit of fluff that sees Blunt waiting to make his move at a California party ("We’ve all been singing Billie Jean" – at least that’s plausible, right?). It’s followed by the similarly perky Dangerous, which somehow marries Michael Sembello’s Flashdance soundtrack fave Maniac with Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only, but Blunt then surrenders to familiar, soupy balladeering. Best Laid Plans teems with cliché ("It seems you only want the things that you can’t have") and some David Gilmour-lite guitar noodles that also rear up on Superstar, So Far Gone and No Tears. That last title belies lachrymosity that could float a battleship....full text |
| Guardian |
| Since selling 12m copies of his debut album, Back to Bedlam – thanks largely to the ubiquitous wedding reception favourite, You're Beautiful – James Blunt has struggled to overcome collective public embarrassment in regards to his success. Readers of the Sun voted You're Beautiful the most irritating song of all time, while the last single from his under-performing second album missed the UK top 100. Blunt has prefaced this third album by saying he wanted to move away from "writing sad songs about poor old me", and while the first single Stay the Night is a jaunty strumalong about meeting a new lady friend, the rest defaults to focus-group melancholia. Nearly every song features Blunt's breathless croon over a bed of simple piano chords or chugging guitars, and the few deviations – the vocal harmonies on country-tinged closer If Time Is All I Have, for example – seem like profound experimentation. Shallow, soulless and strangely cynical, Some Kind of Trouble is a thoroughly depressing listen....full text |
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